A design realignment

The prob­lem with hav­ing a spe­cific lay­out style is that it only caters to one mood or topic.

In an attempt to achieve even more uni­ver­sal mid-tone min­i­mal­ism, I’ve re-aligned things a bit: more con­trast, bolder titles, com­po­si­tion to a ver­ti­cal rhythm, and a lack of that tit­u­lar cap­i­tal E that was taunt­ing my sense of alignment.

Let’s see how long this lasts.

Blogging milestone

The num­ber of com­ments I’ve received has exceeded the num­ber of entries I’ve writ­ten, the lat­ter of which passed 1000 this year. I remem­ber when I first started in 2002, using a basic con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem I wrote with Perl scripts. It didn’t even sup­port com­ments. Eventually I moved to Movable Type, and finally set­tled on WordPress.

I’m glad to say that I don’t get any more of those ran­dom one or two word com­ments that never actu­ally say any­thing, although they’re pretty com­mon on other blogs.

They give me feed­back, make me think, and fur­ther the dis­cus­sion of what I say.

Balls of Fury

In this secret soci­ety, the com­pe­ti­tion is bru­tal and the stakes are high. It is the unsanc­tioned, under­ground, and utterly unhinged world of clan­des­tine Ping-Pong tour­na­ments. Down-and-out for­mer pro­fes­sional Ping-Pong phe­nom Randy Daytona (Dan Fogler) is sucked into this mael­strom when FBI Agent Rodriguez (George Lopez) recruits him.

Balls of Fury, a com­edy that mixes ping-pong, matrix effects, and Christopher Walken, comes out in less than a month. George Lopez’s Scarface impres­sion is spot on, and the fact that it’s based on Enter the Dragon (although the title comes from another Bruce Lee movie, Fist of Fury) gives it even more super awe­some flava.

My friends agreed to come watch it in the the­aters with me. Even Bronwen is going to make it, trav­el­ling over 700km to be here. I’ve been chomp­ing at the bit to see this since John sent me the trailer last year.

A trip to New Hamshire

This Sunday, I’ll be fly­ing to New Hampshire — with cohort Louise — for two weeks of train­ing. The sched­ule is pretty open, with nights and week­ends off, giv­ing us a chance to travel and explore.

Confidence and socia­bil­ity comes and goes in cycles for me. When I first found out about the trip I was at a low-point, so I wasn’t feel­ing strong enough to make extra plans. Such plans would have included tak­ing a few extra days off to meet Maggie (aka number18) at my trans­fer in Philly on the way back. One day I’ll get to meet her and take pic­tures of her.

The good thing is that I’m on an up-swing right now, so the excite­ment is start­ing to set­tle in my brain.